The traditional means of dispensing drug involves a doctor meeting with a patient and prescribing drugs or drugs based on a particular diagnosis. A prescription is then hand written or printed, and generally must be signed. The doctor generally updates the patient's paper file, and the patient takes their prescription to a pharmacy to be filled.
This traditional system of dispensing drug is considered relatively slow, inefficient, inconvenient, and various security or accuracy problems can arise. For example, a pharmacy can encounter a problem with a prescription because of the illegibility of the handwriting, which requires a call back to the doctor for clarification. There is also a potential problem where the wrong prescription is filled if the pharmacy does not do the call back to clarify a prescription. Further, potential adverse drug interactions are dependant on the doctor or pharmacist manually researching or knowing the interactions in order to recognize the possible issues and alter a prescription on that basis. Because drugs have a finite lifespan, there are also a number of inventory management issues which have yet to be addressed by current drug dispensing methodologies.
In view of these and other problems, a novel method, system and apparatus for dispensing drugs is desirable.